Off-topic Lazyweb-ish rant: Why, with the rise of the writeable web, are browsers still stuck in this “Go to a page, get what you want, go to the next page” mentality? Tabbed browsing means I have 3-4 windows and between 15 and 20 tabs open, with some individual tabs open for days at a time. Partly as cause and partly as effect of tabs, the amount of writing and annotating I do in browser-mediated environments — weblogs, wikis, bulletin boards, even tagging del.icio.us links — already high, is rising still further.
So why, when my browser crashes or I re-start, do I not just get every URL that was open at the time of the crash? Why, when I accidently reload or close a window with a form in it, do I lose the content of the form? And why can’t I undo edits in the form field? Can it really be 2004 and there is an app with an installed base in the hundreds of millions that doesn’t support Undo?
- Big Fat Asterisk: I was a browser slut until 2002, using IE, Opera, and various Mozilla variants on Windows and Linux boxes, and these problems existed in all browsers I used then. Having switched to the Mac, and latterly to Safari, I now don’t know if they’ve been solved elsewhere, but I’m going to assume not, and continue with the rant accordingly. Someone please tell me if I’m wrong.
Browser writers seem to be stuck in the “value is stored at the center and displayed at the edges” mentality, not having realized that an increasing amount of value is created in the browser, not just displayed in it. This display bias shows up everywhere. I can, right now, tell Safari in 3 clicks to use a personalized style sheet to display pages for websites I’ve never seen before, an almost useless feature (worse: an almost surely detrimental feature) put in place because the Safari team, like most browser teams, worships at the temple of Control of Display.
But who sets the size of the text area in the form I use on Many-to-Many all the time? Ben and Mena. And for my use of the site, they got it wrong — the entry field I’m writing this post in is too narrow and too short, but I can’t resize it in the browser, only globally and at the server, and even then not easily and only in a way that migh discomfit my colleagues. Why can I override the visual preferences of professional web designers, but not customize something I use all the time for my own work?
Even plugin work like Textile is wrapped up in the decoration of writing, but not the fact of the writing. When you are writing in a browser, it is often to capture a thought quickly, so the work can be both urgent and opportunistic: must. get. thought. out. If you accidently delete part of your Word doc (something Word makes pretty hard, because they know how to write software that assumes writing is important), you may lose an evening, as the thing your boss needs your boss still needs, crash or no. But everyone who loses a draft due to bad browser behavior knows that the loss is de-motivating, and that a good number of those posts are never reconstructed.
Likewise, everyone who writes things of any length knows that over a certain word count, you write it in a word processor or text editor, and paste it in the browser when you’re done. Value created by the Web is destroyed by the browser, because the design pattern of “Create something in the browser” is so poorly supported.
If I had to make a short a ‘make the browser a better writing environment’ wish list, it would run something like:
1. Autosave on quit or crash. My browser, to a first approximation, is my workspace. Let me say “Restore all windows and contents to where they were before the quit.”
2. Multiple undo for reload and tab closes. Oops, I didn’t mean to remove the window I had that post in — bring it back. (My memory of Windows, especially, was that this happened often, partly because the left hand hovers over the CTL key, and CTL-R re-loads.)
3. Let me re-size or tear off the form field itself, and give me undo in it as well.
There’s tons more stuff here, of course — some WebDAV+RSS combo so I can make any folder a drafts or publish folder (blosxom style), or tie existing word processors to form fields, so that SubEthaEdit would auto-open when I wanted to post, but really, the browser has been around for a long time now; why should anyone even have to make an argument that autosave, undo, and re-sizing are good functions for an app to support?
But even more than this list, I want the people who write browsers to care that they are seriously and increasingly important writing environments, and that the current display bias leaves the average browser someplace between sucktastic and actually unusable on the sub-optimality-o-meter.
1. William Finkel on August 1, 2004 10:49 PM writes...
Great call. This is a problem that gets me all the time; especially undo in text entry fields.
Permalink to Comment2. Andy Baio on August 2, 2004 12:18 AM writes...
Firefox supports multiple levels of undo in text entry fields, and the TabBrowser extension for Firefox automagically saves and restores tab sessions when closed (but not form content).
I'd love to see resize arrows on form fields.
Permalink to Comment3. phil jones on August 2, 2004 12:31 AM writes...
This is funny. I was trying to post this link
http://www.infoworld.co m/article/04/06/11/24OPstrategic_1.html
and your site keeps rejecting it as "questionable content" because of the "com / ar"
Permalink to Comment4. Cory Doctorow on August 2, 2004 1:32 AM writes...
I do *all* my composition in BBEdit -- it really saves my ass on numerous occassions.
I want a local proxy that captures all my submitted forms and drops their content into lightly structured ASCII files.
Permalink to Comment5. Jacob on August 2, 2004 3:55 AM writes...
On the Mac there exists a browser called OmniWeb. The current beta introduces a lot of cool stuff - including the concept of workspaces which you can save and re-open later, you can also use auto-save. It used to have its own rendering engine but now uses WebCore (same as Safari). Not free but given the innovative interface you may find it worth the nominal cost. The OmniGroup team are also communicative about development and would no doubt be keen to hear ideas for other improvements (such as a popup textarea editor). I haven't moved over to it yet beacuse the early betas were a bit unstable and I'm not sure about its tabs, but I'm going to try again as I am continuiously loosing open sites due to crashes and restarts...
Incidentally regarding textareas you can apply your own stylesheet that overrides the textarea attributes (size, font, etc) leaving all other stylesheet elements used on the site untouched. Just stick the line below in a text file with the extension .css and (in Safari) choose that file. All text areas will then be that specified size. The sizes below are a bit extreme but demonstrate well, I'd probably leave the width alone and just make the textarea taller.
textarea { width: 400px; height: 600px }
Permalink to Comment6. Sencer on August 2, 2004 4:05 AM writes...
I agree, that this is something that I would like to see build into browsers.
Currently I use (Firefox Extensions):
http://prismicspiral.com/scribe/
to save Forms-fields
http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/sessionsaver
to restore all tabs when restarting the browser (Opera has had this function already built-in for ages now.)
http://mozex.mozdev.org/
to be able to edit textareas in the external editor of choice (e.g. UltraEdit). However this is an old-style extension (8.0), which requires you to have somthing like
http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info.php/configmania
to be able to configure it, if you are using 9.0 or newer.
I am sure in the following years we will see a lot of improvements to web-experience now that the monoculture is once again being exchanged for competition in the browser-market.
Permalink to Comment7. moehlert on August 2, 2004 6:35 AM writes...
I use Opera quite a bit for research, etc. and it does provide a 'continue last session' feature. I also like the way you can pass around Opera sessions by sending *.win files - much more useful than files of bookmarks.
Permalink to Comment8. john.e.boy on August 3, 2004 3:13 AM writes...
Something you mentioned has bugged me for a while. Using non WYSIWYG edit boxes writing my blog. So I hunted round the net and found:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/itools-htmlarea/
http://dynarch.com/mishoo/htmlarea.epl
http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/spaw/
I'm using html area at the moment. I has undo + redo buttons, but I'll be damned if I can figure out how to use them properly.
HTML Area was real easy to configure and add to my blog software. It took maybe 30 minutes of fiddling.
john.e.boy
Permalink to Comment9. Timothy Klein on August 3, 2004 3:52 AM writes...
Unless you are a Linux- or BSD-geek, you may never have heard of it, but Konqueror (the web browser for KDE) has a fairly nice editing setup.
Any text input box has: Undo, Redo, Find, Replace, and Spell-Check (!).
It is also fairly forgiving aboud accidentally hitting the 'Back' button -- upon return, form data is still present. An ability to save data inside text forms would complete the picture. As a matter of fact, I should write the KDE folks. I bet it would be simple to implement.
It isn't a full blown editor, but it comes close.
Sadly, you need to be using *nix to use it. But I feel no need to venture outside Konqueror to post on web logs.
Permalink to Comment10. Shantanu Oak on August 3, 2004 4:02 AM writes...
>> The design pattern of "Create something in the browser" is so poorly supported.
It reminds me of teaching "blogging" to one of my clients who is over 60 years of age.
For years, all the browsers are using Backspace button to go to the previous page.
He could not write a single paragraph in the text area because whenever he did a typing mistake and wanted to correct it using the "Backspace" button, the browser would take him to the previous page! I hopelessly tried to explain him that it would happen if the "Focus" is somewhere outside of the text area. Finally, Here is how I solved the problem using an extension called "Keyconfig" for firefox.
http://mozilla.dorando.at/readme.html
Once installed choose "Keyconfig" from Tools menu.
select Key19 cmd handlebackspace and delete or change the shortcut key.
1. Autosave on quit or crash.
Session Saver extension for firefox. IE is out of luck.
2. Multiple undo for reload and tab closes.
"Undo close Tab" extension for Firefox. IE is out of luck again.
3. Let me re-size the form field.
"Increase Form field" bookmarklet that works for both, IE and firefox.
http://www.shantanuoak.com/sites/links4.php
>> give me undo in it as well.
Ctrl + Z
John wrote...
>> HTML Area was real easy to configure and add to my blog software.
>> It took maybe 30 minutes of fiddling.
John, the point is that we all don't need to spend 30 minutes "fiddling" to get something working that should have been a part of the software itself in the first place.
>> everyone who loses a draft due to bad browser behavior knows that the loss is de-motivating,
Permalink to Comment>> and that a good number of those posts are never reconstructed.
The loss is not limited to lost posts, I have met a number of users who stopped using net after such an incident. It created a "Not - working" or "Not - for - me" attitude.
11. john.e.boy on August 3, 2004 10:05 AM writes...
Shantanu wrote...
.John, the point is that we all don't need to spend
.30 minutes "fiddling" to get something working that
.should have been a part of the software itself in
.the first place.
No I agree. But I was just pointing out that these things can be fixed, albeit outside the browser.
The nice thing about HTML edit is it is wysiwyg html. It has tool bar buttons for bold, italic, fonts, headings, tables, etc...
And it replaces the old boring text box without the need to update the HTML of that page. I wish FireFox would do something like that :-)
Although it'd be hard to see how blogs + forums that filter a lot of the HTML out of forms would cope.
cheers monkey boys,
john.e.boy
Permalink to Comment12. charles on August 3, 2004 10:52 AM writes...
Except for resizing the form fields (and that may be possible too, I just haven't ever tried it), Opera can do all the things you were asking for.
Permalink to Comment13. Marty on August 3, 2004 1:44 PM writes...
Great stuff. And i'll add the minor annoyance i've been asking for for years:
put a [back] button in the bottom right corner, next to the down-scroll. my two favorite buttons always seem to be about as far away as possible...
Permalink to Comment14. fred on August 3, 2004 8:55 PM writes...
*sigh* And here's a problem with systems that don't let you preview your posts before committing to them...
>>3. Let me re-size or tear off the form field itself, and give me undo in it as well.
>Safari doesn't support this, but other (modern) browsers do.
I meant that to apply only to the "undo" feature. I'm not sure of 'tear-off' form fields.
Permalink to Comment15. Clay Shirky on August 6, 2004 10:09 AM writes...
Jus want to say, if anyone has read this far, that I'm in love wiht Firefox and am working on configuring it to the suggestions listed here (Undo tab close extension does not seem to work on Ff on the Mac, sadly), and will report back.
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